Sunday, January 08, 2012

Svevo's Zeno 2: the croupier's rake

The individualism of
methodological individualism is a strange beast. On the one hand, it promises a
robust defense of the individual as the ultimate level of social analysis. All
collectives, go the doctrine, are composed of individual behaviors. There are
no collective agents – like a pantomime horse, when you see a collective – a
state, a firm, an organization – you are seeing the sheeting over the actors
inside it. And yet, this defense of the individual is, at the same time, an
emptying out of the individual. Whatever his or her beliefs, passions, or
promises, in effect the content of the individual consists of an algorithm for
calculating the maximization of his or her advantage. It is thus that the
pantomime horse of capitalist organizations gets to its feet and proceeds to
walk all over you. Hayek, who was a great believer in individualism, was
conscious of this paradox and explains it in The Counterrevolution in
Science. It happens that those who are
not entirely sold on individualism and those who emphasize ‘historicism’ – the
interpretation of social action that does not hold that a universal maximizing
principle is at the heart of it – are pretty much synonymous. This gives us the
paradox that those who emphasize the collective level are also those who oppose
the universalism of a conjectural history going back to Smith. Thus,
historicists would dispute that, say, price or monopoly as categories developed
in contemporary economics could be usefully imposed on social behavior in
Egyptian society in 1400 B.C. - the example Hayek uses.

But, according to Hayek: "What this contention
overlooks is that “price” of “monopoly” are not names for definite “things”,
fixed collections of physical attributes which we recognize by some of these
attributes as members of the same class and whose further attributes we
ascertain by observation; but that they are objects which can be defined only
in terms of certain relatins between human beings and which cannot possess any
attributes except those which follow from the relations by which they are
defined. They can be recognized by us as prices or monopolies only because, and
in so rar as, we can recognize these individual attitudes, and from these as
elements compose the structural pattern which we call a price or a monopoly. Of
course the ‘whole” situation, or even the “whole of the men who act, will
greatly diiffer from place to place and from time to time. But it is solely our
capacity to recognize the familiar elements from which the unique situation is
made up which enables us to attach any meaning to the phenomena.” (66)

Hayek’s notion – which
appeals, in the end, to an "us" who is above the wholes of the situation and the
men involved – reflects a pattern of social meanings that capitalism introduced
into Western Europe in the 19th century, and with which, especially,
intellectuals caught up in the sphere of circulation wrestled: the seemingly
unbridgeable difference between the individual as an accounting entity and an
individual as an existential mystery. The latter is on the side of ‘experience’
– but the former rides mankind. Experience fills in the empty algorithmic unit
– the economic individual – with matter that seems, well, beyond the bounds of
his maximizing reason, or the reduction to individuals that is theoretically
called for in analyzing economic action. The money in my pocket passed to me
from some individual, truly, but the individuals involved in the chain that
touched that money are all, with regards to me, rather empy and automatic – the
man who put the money in the ATM machine, the woman who gave me change at the
grocery store, the software engineer who designed paypal, the client who paid
me – all are in my life to varying degrees, but their roles, the money, and
myself seem to be bound together by arithematic more than intimacy. “The
technical form of commerce creates a ralm of values that is more or less
commpletely loosened from its subjective – personal substructure,” Simmel says
(30)

It is in the conflict
between the two aspects that is brought to bear on the discourse on freedom
that was passed down from the ancien regime to the increasingly capitalist
dissolution of the ancien regime in the
nineteenth century. “Commerce always strives – never fully unreal and
never fully realized – towards a stage of development in which things determine
their value through a self-acting mechanism – unmarked by the queion of how
much subjective feeling this mechanism has taken into account as its
precondition or as its matter.” (Simmel, 30)

These conflicting aspects of individualism are very much part of Svevo's novel, Zeno's Conscience - for the conscience is, too, both a peculiar personal thing and a sort of introjection of norms and rules that the individual was never consulted about. At one point Svevo’s narrator, Zeno
Costini, who, as the heir of his
father’s business, has nothing to do – by which we readers understand that he
does not need to do anything to have money – insists on being
given a job with his Olivi, the man to whom Zeno’s father entrusted the
management of the business. Consequently, Zeno is instructed in accounting - or 'economics':

“Olivi’s son, an elegant, bespectacled young man, erudite in all
the commercial sciences, took over my instruction, and I honestly can’t
complain about him. He annoyed me a little with his economic science and his
law of supply and demand, which seemed to me more self-evident than he would
admit. But he showed a certain respect for me as the owner, and I was all the
more grateful because he couldn’t possibly have learned that from his father.
Respect for ownership must have been part of his economic science. He never
scolded me for the mistakes I often made in posting entries; he simply ascribed
them to ignorance and then gave me explanations that were really superfluous.

The trouble came when, what with looking at all those
transactions, I began to feel like making some of my own. In the ledger, very
clearly, I came to visualize my own pocket, and when I posted a sum under
“debit” for our clients, instead of a pen, I seemed to hold in my hand a
croupier’s rake, ready to collect the money scattered over the gaming table.” (166)

The croupier’s rake instead of the pen! – one seems magical, a wand that brings us back to the archaic, pre-capitalist world of treasure, while the other seems anything but magical, imprisoning us in double columns. The libido of the sphere
of circulation flows into this image, which has urged itself upon theorists and
clerks since the days of Law’s system.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.